Brother, can you spare a film

Friday

May 22, 2009 at 12:01 AM

It's a myth we've all heard about before: A panhandler working the corner of a freeway off ramp sporting shabby clothes and an Old Man River beard, then taking a fistful of earnings from a day's "work" and driving home in a BMW.

Aaron Davis

It's a myth we've all heard about before: A panhandler working the corner of a freeway off ramp sporting shabby clothes and an Old Man River beard, then taking a fistful of earnings from a day's "work" and driving home in a BMW.

But has anyone actually seen it? Keith Lowell Jensen decided to test the myth.

"It's one of those ideas I sat on for a really long time, not necessarily as a film, but as sort of a social experiment," said Jensen, who panhandled himself as a teenager, purely because it was the cool, punk rock thing to do.

"I think I was 13 or 14 when you first started really seeing the cardboard signs with the 'Why lie, I need a beer,' and I started hearing that all of those guys are making more money than you do," Jensen said.

"I had two thoughts. The first is, 'That's bull——,' and the other is, 'Why the hell am I working so hard?' " he added with a laugh. "But I kept being curious about it."

After a three-year process, Jensen's curiosity led to him hitting the streets and posing as a panhandler in "Why Lie? I Need a Drink," which will screen at the Plea For Peace Center in Stockton on Saturday night. Both Jensen and producer Jonathan Morken will be on hand for a question-and-answer session after the film showing.

The film screening will be the first such event to be held at the Plea for Peace Center. Stacy Hammon, who is currently booking additional screenings, also has scheduled a showing of films from the Viscera Festival, a collection of horror films done by women, for June 27, with filmmakers scheduled to be on hand.

Hammon is working toward scheduling monthly to bimonthly film screenings at the center, with an aim toward bringing in films from a variety of genres and hopes of creating more exposure for local high school and college students interested in independent film.

Jensen originally had aimed to run a simple social experiment of panhandling on the Internet, to see if anyone would PayPal him a buck or two. But it was after sharing his idea with Morken that the project blossomed into a full-length film, rather than a two-minute YouTube clip.

"It was a weird kind of documentary to make; it's experimental (rather than) historical," Morken said. "On this one we really didn't know our answers; we had to shoot it and write the script backward."

"Our model for this was things like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock," Jensen said over coffee at Peet's in Midtown Sacramento, a stone's throw from the locations where most of the film was shot.

"This experiment wasn't scientific, by any stretch, and people always try to point that out to me. It's like, 'Yeah, we know that.' The deal was to talk about the issue while personalizing it and having some fun with it.

"I like humor that looks at subjects that we're uncomfortable with."

There is no shortage of fun in this movie, as Jensen spent most of his time on the off ramps of Sacramento wired with a lavalier mic and dressed in a variety of costumes, from a banana suit to a mummy to Santa Claus, while Morken and co-producer John Astobiza did their best to keep the camera and boom mic out of sight.

Jensen stated that, while most of his "customers" in the film could tell from the costumes that some sort of project was afoot, most of them were mainly amicable toward him (aside from one guy chasing him with pool toys).

However, things took a darker turn when he shed the costumes and merely went as himself.

"I got flipped off a few times and I got a lot of 'Get a jobs,' " said Jensen, who actually made efforts to get "the full experience" and get arrested for panhandling, but was unsuccessful.

The film was shot over a year and a half, with an equal amount of time spent editing more than 40 hours of footage down to 74 minutes.

The film also showcases the exhausting heat and noise that's part of spending extended periods of time near a freeway. Jensen never stayed in the same place for more than half an hour during shooting.

Also included in the film are several interviews with actual panhandlers and homeless people.

"It's light in the beginning, then progressively you see more of the side of it that's not funny," Morken said. "It gets into more of the serious end of it where you see their camps and that it's not a glorious life that they're leading.

"We interviewed tons of people. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, but we found only one case of someone who could actually make a good living (panhandling)," Morken added.

"I just hope that we took something that was a random concept to (the audience), the panhandler, and they'd walk away seeing human beings," Jensen said.

"And that they don't see the myth when they come off the off ramp, they see that each one of them has their own set of issues and problems.

"I think the myth is just an excuse not to help when you see this problem all around, when someone is right in front of you asking for help."

Contact Aaron Davis at features@recordnet.com.

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